Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings Read online

  What could be done for a psyche, or for a culture, in love with oppressive authority, or with outmoded fantasies about Eros? How can you bring the cycle of illusions and vastation to an end, if not for the masses who are by Freud's account bound to be lazy and stupid, then at least for promising individuals, those who need to bear the burdens of civilization, and whose health is, accordingly, most precious?

  Freud attacked this problem from as many sides as he could. In his writings he tried to direct people away from crippling religious beliefs, from the longing for the primal father, who would take the place of a richer and more complex super-ego, and for the longing for the mother, which, in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud implicitly equates with the ‘oceanic feeling’, the sense of being overwhelmed by an enveloping presence – a regression, in other words, back to the undifferentiated world of the id and the womb. The sublime and the beautiful are primary aesthetic experiences because they arise from – and with some luck transform – the first fantasies of authority and of love.

  In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud reflected on hypnotism and taught us – W. H. Auden praises him for looking deeply into the most common things – how close this apparently harmless diversion was to being enthralled by the fascist orator, by the general or by the charismatic teacher. He showed in that book how difficult it is to sustain the later acquisitions of the psyche, ideals and rationality. He argued that we want to sink back into easy pleasures and easy hates by letting a masterly object take the place of the super-ego, and acquiescing to what appears to be discipline, but is really the indulgence of early and brutal desires. To Freud, the greatest human pleasure conceivable would perhaps be found in committing barbarous deeds with the full approval of the Over-I. To destroy the Jews, the gypsies, the queers, and to do so not with an aching conscience, but in the name of the Father and Fatherland, what human pleasure could exceed that?

  For the individual caught in erotic repetition, there was of course therapy. In therapy, Freud plays with fire. For in order to disabuse us of our reliance on authority in its most overbearing form, Freud, and the therapists who followed him, assuming the role he composed for them, effectively masquerade as that authority. The therapist puts on a disguise which can easily corrupt the wearer, that of omniscience, of the subject who is supposed to know. The result can be that the man comes to be defined by the mask. It shapes and distorts, or maybe simply confirms, the contours of his face. The authoritarian pose never left him, says Auden, in part because within the drama that is therapy, Freud was willing to be what he most feared and despised – the figure who promised complete truth and endless love. The result of activating primal fantasies was the transference, a state of emotional vertigo not unlike falling in love. There was then the work of allowing the patient to aim her richest hopes and fears at the analyst and showing her that none of them, ever, could be realized in experience and that she would have to accept the Freudian compromise: half truths, partial pleasures.

  The therapist, in this understanding, becomes whatever the patient needs and wants him to be. To maintain his own emotional health, the therapist has got to recognize that in therapy he is not himself; his godly status is a hallucination shared by all of his most adept patients, but pertaining in no way to the facts of the case. What rich dissonances between the world of the consulting room and that of the street must then arise. How can even the most self-aware analyst not occasionally succumb to the desire that Sartre thought was at the fulcrum of bad faith, the desire to be god?

  At one point, in an analysis that seemed to be sinking into failure, Freud cried bitterly to his patient: ‘We are getting nowhere because you do not think it worth your while to love an old man.’ Perhaps the old man was too palpably mortal for this patient, not a deity who lives forever. He was simply a grumpy, undernourished codger, with bandages on his jaw from all the cancer operations, with two chows and a bourgeois living room and too many books.

  If Freud's myths of love and power and repetition have some bearing on experience, then questions remain: is there anything to do about this distress save for reading Freud scripturally, or entering therapy, save, that is, for finding an old man worthy of love and becoming a good deal like him? The problematic of love and authority and of the hunger to repeat is Freud's great legacy to us; and his solutions are manifold, but they all take us back under the rule of the grey deity, the Reality Principle. He leaves us without charisma, without anything akin to the glowing world that the myths and the movies both in their ways deliver. Do we have to give up all glories and live the nobly stoical Roman life that Freud seemed finally both to accept himself and to commend for others?

  Rosalind and Falstaff are two of Shakespeare's most adored characters, figures with whom audiences habitually fall in love. Both of these figures are great entertainers and vital presences, but can they also be great teachers, beloved for their wisdom? (Can they, perhaps, do the old man's job better than he could himself?) They are both flawed, of that there's little doubt. Falstaff leads men to their deaths so as to line his pockets. Rosalind can be a vaunting egotist who has trouble remembering that the other people around her are real.

  What binds the two together is wit, a particular kind of wit that enlarges the contours of experience, letting us feel that there is more to know and relish about life than we had imagined. Instead of authority and succour, the truth and the cure, they give us variety: not cohesion, but expansion, not contraction and concentration, but extemporaneous performance.

  Both are, like their creator, master play-makers. Rosalind plays for and with her beloved, Orlando; Falstaff for and with his beloved, Prince Hal, who in the end bitterly spurns him. By playing they expand the interpretations of reality, they show us that it could be many other ways than it is commonly conceived. They show that what is taken seriously by all of the serious-minded people can also be laughed raucously away. And they suggest the corollary too, a truth that Freud knew very well: that what the sensible people commonly laugh at or ignore can be invested with enriching sense.

  The Falstaff of Henry IV Parts I and II is a great jester, a player like no other, but in his jest at least he is entirely benevolent. As he says, he is witty in himself and the cause of that wit is in other men. Hal, the future King of England, who thinks that he is Falstaff's pupil and that he has learned all the fat man has to teach, has a rancid wit, is prone to cruelty and is aiming for control. Falstaff's humour is expansive: he gets people around him to say and think things they never would have without him. Hal's humour contracts and reduces. He skewers people on the point of a word, insisting that all that matters about Falstaff can be summarized in his rather self-serving use of one word, ‘instinct’, or that Frances, the apprentice tapster, is no more than a walking linguistic hitch, the infinite repetition of the word ‘anon’. Hal tries to force people back in the direction of repetition, because that is where he can know and manipulate them. And, Freud would say, because back to repetition is where they, and we, all wish to go.

  In the tavern scene, a magnificent psychoanalysis that exceeds every analysis yet attempted, Falstaff jumps gaily into the Oedipal circle, filling the role of Hal's father. ‘Do you stand for my father,’ says Hal, attempting to precipitate and control his own transference, ‘and examine me upon the particulars of my life.’ Will Hal remember or repeat? Work through or stay clutching the past?

  What ensues is a splendid dialogue between Falstaff and the Prince; at issue is who will be the Prince's true father, Falstaff or the cold usurper, Bolingbroke. On some level, every psychoanalyst, no matter how humane, must hope for some level of benign influence over the patient. Falstaff being Falstaff, that is a man who has no repressions, and who makes what is latent in others overt in himself, drives directly and humorously for that power. He sets in by trying wholly to displace Bolingbroke, the merely natural father. Thus Falstaff takes the part of the old usurper: ‘That thou art my son,’ he says to Hal, ‘I have partly
thy mother's word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip that doth warrant me.’

  Beneath the Groucho-style abuse, there's a point. Who could know – before DNA testing, at least – who his biological father was? And if the identity of the biological father is up for grabs, then surely the role of spiritual father is open to competition as well. So Falstaff sets about advertising himself as a better ideal for Hal than his own father. There is, says Falstaff, ‘a virtuous man whom I have often noted in thy company, but I know not his name’ (Henry IV, Part 1, II, iv).

  Prince: What manner of man, and it like your Majesty?

  Falstaff: A goodly portly man, i' faith, and a corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage.

  But the prince is having none of it. He's afraid to take the exchange further, afraid even to toy with the idea that Falstaff is putting into play. Quickly – we see where the power lies in this analysis – he usurps Falstaff's position and takes the role of his own father. All of a sudden, the space of extemporization – ‘it is a real lived experience’, says Freud of the transference, ‘but one made possible by particularly favourable conditions, and purely temporary in nature’ (‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through’, p. 41) – where identities are in flux, closes down. And when it does, Hal shows that he is truly Bolingbroke's son, for he is just as cold and ruthless and cruel as his father. ‘Wherein is he good,’ Hal says of Falstaff, ‘but to taste sack and drink it? wherein neat and cleanly but to carve a capon and eat it? wherein cunning but in craft? wherein crafty but in villainy? wherein villainous but in all things? wherein worthy but in nothing?’ (II, iv).

  Falstaff, never outdone, comes back with his most plangent lines: ‘If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked! If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damn'd; if to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh's lean kine are to be lov'd’ (II, iv).

  Falstaff is self-serving here: he wants to be in favour when Hal takes the throne. But he is more than self-serving, too. For if Hal could actually imagine the situation that so revolts him, that he finds so unbearable, the one where he disowned Bolingbroke and took Falstaff for a father, then he might offer an entirely different sort of rulership.

  Falstaff demystifies Bolingbroke: in the mock-play, Hal's father is not an omnivorous god out of Freud's Totem and Taboo, but a man in jeopardy, elevated beyond his prowess, whose situation can be seen humorously, ironically. Rather than play the father as heavy primal man, the hoarder of women and the slayer of sons, Falstaff offers the vision of a father who is himself confused, flawed and mortal. Underneath, he suggests, all fathers may be so. They are not to be maligned for their weakness, but understood, forgiven, laughed at and then laughed with. As Falstaff plays the role of Bolingbroke, we understand, so Bolingbroke merely plays the role of king.

  Hal takes in only a part of this beautiful lesson: he sees that all authority is based on playing, and he resolves to continue as a master player of the primal role. Made wholly sane by Falstaff, he might have tried to make his constituents sane by blending authority and humour in one personage, proving that they need not be separable.

  But Hal's mind is too small to encompass this kind of therapy, this inspired breaking and remaking of the paternal imago. In Shakespeare, children are all too much like their parents and all too little like their lovers and friends. Hal insists at the end on turning the tables. He assumes the role of his father, and with a meanness that he, mistaking Falstaff utterly, takes for wit, he assumes his father's old cruel, domineering role, the legacy of the Bolingbroke clan. He turns Falstaff's jest into invective.

  Socrates showed that a man could both jest and wield authority – and it is the promise of this capacity that makes Falstaff into the Elizabethan Socrates. Says Montaigne of Socrates, ‘He was seen, unmoved in countenance, putting up for twenty-seven years with hunger and poverty, with loutish sons, with a cantankerous wife and finally with calumny, tyranny, imprisonment, leg-irons and poison. Yet that very man, when the dictates of courtesy made him a guest at a drinking match, was, from the entire army, the man who best acquitted himself. Nor did he refuse to play five-stones with the boys nor to run about with them astride a hobby horse. And he did it with good grace: for Philosophy says that all activities are equally becoming in a wise man, all equally honour him’ (The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Screech), p. 1261). It's the inability to become that kind of philosopher king, not a Platonic but a Socratic monarch, that makes Hal so sad a figure.

  The man who kills his prisoners in France and who hangs poor Bardolph is the son of the grotesque father whose cycle Falstaff, the inspired psychoanalyst, tries to break. Perhaps Shakespeare can imagine no other kind of effective king – if so, he is deeply Freudian, not responsive to his larger and better Falstaffian self. Freud's account of the successful leader is remarkably apt for Bolingbroke and, sadly, for Hal as well: ‘His ego had few libidinal ties; he loved no one but himself, or other people insofar as they served his needs. To objects his ego gave away no more than was barely necessary.’ (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921) Maybe that is the best we can hope for; but in the centre of what is perhaps Shakespeare's most striking meditation on rulership, there is a force that undermines this hard wisdom and a hope for something better.

  Rosalind in As You Like It is, like Falstaff, an enemy of reduction. In the tavern scene, Falstaff assaults political reduction; all through her play Rosalind contends against reduction of the erotic kind. She comes to life as a character after she hears Touchstone the jester proclaim that erotic love is nothing more than an affair of rutting, wiping clean, and rushing away. Touchstone doesn't have anything to do with turning base metals into gold, as his name suggests, but rather takes what men and women have concurred in finding precious and exposes its sordid underside. Touchstone is a wild Freudian analyst whose nose is always ready to sniff out sex and scat. Touchstone is Hal's jester cousin.

  Rosalind has been swooning over Orlando's very conventional love poems, poems that are petrified Petrarch, at best. Touchstone, always obliging, pops up to enlighten her: ‘I'll rhyme you so eight years together,’ he says, then quickly hits stride:

  If a hart do lack a hind,

  Let him seek out Rosalind.

  If the cat will after kind,

  So be sure will Rosalind.

  Wint'red garments must be lin'd,

  So must slender Rosalind. (III, ii)

  Despite all the refined sentiment on display in the Forest of Arden, Touchstone insists, what it all comes down to is simple instinct, sweating and rutting and the two-backed beast.

  To which Rosalind says, eventually, yes. Yes, but. She takes in all that Touchstone knows and, with a lightning celerity – Rosalind is one of Shakespeare's quickest thinking figures – begins compounding a version of erotic love that includes sexual desires but isn't bound and defined by them.

  In her mock dramas with Orlando, in which she's disguised as a boy, Rosalind, goaded by Touchstone, grows candid about her own shifting sexual desires. But she doesn't stop there. For, to her, shifting erotic desire is the inspiration for shifting human identity and for the playful exercise of wit. Without sex, life would be insupportable, but without self-willed changes of identity, shifting, theatrical improvisation, life would be impossible as well. Sex is finite, the affair of an hour. But play, pure extemporization, is endless, at least when the player is Rosalind (and Shakespeare). So, Rosalind avers, Orlando is going to have to put up with someone who never wants the same thing twice, and never is the same person on any two occasions: ‘I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen; more clamorous than a parrot against rain; more new-fangled than an ape; more giddy in my desires than a monkey: I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are dispos'd to be merry; I will laugh like a hyen, and that when thou art inclin'd to sleep’ (IV, i).
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  In short, Rosalind asserts, ‘make the doors upon a woman's wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and 'twill out at the key-hole; stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney’ (IV, i). What Rosalind promises, in short, is a life of Shakespearean variety and largesse (and tribulation) – a life she might never have had the wherewithal to conceive, had not Touchstone sent her flying into her own broadening fields of play.

  The woman of Orlando's mawkish poetry is simple and clichéd. What Rosalind seeks to do in her erotic education of her wooer is to complicate this standing version. The woman behind Orlando's facile fiction is the archetypal woman, who stands in for the mother, and who, looked for, will be found and found unsatisfying. Orlando, in quest of simplicity, will be inclined to find it, or make it where it is not easily found. Rosalind puts all of her energy and humanizing, therapeutic force into teaching Orlando that love is more than anything one can readily comprehend, at least once the exercise of wit has taken it beyond Freudian-style reductions. Imagination, Rosalind suggests, can push us past the desire for the old parental imagos, even though such desires may still abide at the core of erotic need.

  Rosalind approaches Orlando disguised as a young man, as Ganymede. Orlando, self-enclosed, and enclosed in easy rather than demanding fictions about love, needs the transitional stage of a narcissistic attraction in order to be drawn out, very slowly, from himself. Surely on some level the figure of Rosalind shows through the disguise – she is there and not there. But that is all Orlando, the man, can bear: to be confronted immediately by a woman whose wit makes her exceed his libidinal stereotypes would send him screaming away in terror. Rosalind engages Orlando's narcissism to help him to pass beyond it into something else. She hopes to help connect Orlando, however undeserving he may be, to something that is more complex and finer than he is.